


deliverance

by alterdiem



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish Swears, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, M/M, POV Ronan Lynch, Pre-Epilogue, Ronan Lynch Has Feelings, Ronan Lynch Swears, Soft Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, author finds swearing cathartic, author is an ex-catholic who thinks too much about capital g God, author projects onto fav character, it's all about the repression baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-18 00:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21519079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alterdiem/pseuds/alterdiem
Summary: His confession sits in the silent air of the church, and then it sinks down into the foundation where Ronan doesn't have to look at it anymore. Knitting his fingers together, he lets out an irritated sound. Quietly, still staring at the ceiling, he admits, “I want to move forward. I just don’t know how.”After the day of almost-unmaking, Ronan dwells on the uncertainty of life, looks for comfort in his homie, God, and finds consolation in Adam Parrish.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 7
Kudos: 139





	deliverance

After his father had died, Ronan had seriously doubted that he was going to survive to his 18th birthday. After all, he was a dreamer or a weapon or some sort of god. Whatever he was, he figured that he was in the business of burning out hard and fast, disappearing before anyone could think about trying to save him. 

But that was before July 4th—back when the night terrors still haunted his dreams and he woke up out of breath and dripping in sweat. He’d grown since then, releasing the shame and self-hatred that he had slipped on like a suffocating second skin. He had accepted his tenuous grip on his identity and future. In the end, he was just Ronan, a teenage boy who took whatever came his way. But he was also more than himself.

In the past year, he had made a group of inseparable friends. He had restored the Barns and brought back impossible, wondrous creatures and objects. He had gotten to see his mother again. He had kissed Adam, and Adam had kissed him back. Again. And again. And again.

He had things to live for; he had people, places, and events that got him here, a week past his 18th birthday, lying next to Adam’s sleeping form in a small, shitty apartment above St. Agnes. 

They were curled up together on Adam’s thin mattress, comforter twisted around their bodies like a cocoon. Ronan had caught glimpses of Adam as he had slipped in and out of sleep all night, only now properly pausing to gaze at him.

Sometimes, when Ronan looks at Adam, he’s struck by his strange features. Adam is all odd angles and gaunt eyes, muscle and sinew, stubbornness and purpose. He’s a puzzle of mismatched pieces, culminating into someone who blurs the lines of what humans should look like. If Ronan were to admit it (which he wouldn’t without copious amounts of alcohol), he thought Adam looked goddamn ethereal. _Fuck._ Looking at Adam like this always hit a pang in his chest that slowly radiated to the rest of his body, warming him from the inside out. Sometimes the pang traveled to his belly, staying there and pooling into a red, hazy want. It scared him—wanting terrified him. 

After his father had died, he had become accustomed to his life going to absolute shit. Everything that could have gone wrong, _did_ go wrong. Declan had removed him from the Barns. Ronan’s own dreams had turned against him. He had drunk himself into a black abyss, trying to numb all of the change and the pain. But he had been getting better; _life_ had been getting better, and he had allowed himself to want again, little by little. To want something was to shed his spiky armor and reveal his soft insides, like a trusting animal. He had allowed himself to become vulnerable, to soften around the edges.

He had thought that everything was going well, or at least, well enough—until last week. Even just the _thought_ of last week is enough to make him feel unsteady, heartbeat picking up as his breath catches.

Trying to calm himself, Ronan takes a sharp breath in and closes his eyes, only opening them when he’s sure that he’s not going to growl or scream or kick out in anger. He’s tired of being angry, especially around Adam, who makes him want to turn his anger into something less vicious. Instead, he tries to steady himself by focusing on Adam’s serene, sleeping face. For a moment, he thinks he’s succeeding, but then he slips his eyes too far down and sees Adam's hands and he’s reminded of everything all over again. 

Everything—Adam’s hands around his throat, his mother’s death, Gansey dying, Gansey coming back to life again, everything being stable for now but changing in the next few months. Everyone leaving. All of the events spinning around like a nauseating carousel ride with Ronan at the center of it. 

He had worked so hard for this life, yet it had almost completely crumbled around him—still threatens to crumble around him—in an instant. It was a stark reminder that nothing was certain, nothing was guaranteed, and so once again, he was terrified of wanting. It was incredibly frustrating. 

Suddenly, it’s too much to be lying on this mattress—lying next to Adam—so he rolls over and stands up, quietly throwing on the jeans and t-shirt that he had left on the floor earlier that night. He doesn’t even bother with socks or shoes as he cracks the apartment door open and makes his way down to the church, bare feet slapping against the cold wood of the stairs. 

The church’s double doors creak when he opens them, echoing eerily as he makes his way along one of the front pews, hands skimming over the top of the pew behind him. It’s a comforting gesture, soothing him as he takes in the shadows in the corners of the room and the moonlight shining through the stained glass windows. It still smells like the incense from the mass earlier that day, preserved for this service of one. 

Ronan reaches the end of the aisle, the end closest to the cross at the center of the room, and sits down on the pew behind him. In this position, he’s directly facing God, which makes him feel too observed—too judged—so he shifts his body until he’s lying down, legs dangling off the end of the pew. He stares up at the chipped ceiling and feels a bit better. 

He doesn’t really know why he’s here, or rather, he does, but he doesn’t want to admit it. The last time he was here in this pensive, anxious state, he had asked to understand himself. 

_What am I?_

He hadn’t gotten an answer, and he was fine with that, really. He had figured out a part of that answer on his own. He wasn’t sure if he would ever know the other parts—the why or the how—but that was an issue that he planned on pondering for a lifetime.

He remembers being here, lying down on a pew, on the night that he had dreamed Chainsaw. Back then, he had been restless and drunk off his ass. For a second, he kind of wishes that he had a six-pack of beer to ease his current tension, except no, he doesn’t, and the realization hits him so hard that he loudly bites out, “I don’t want to go back to how I used to be.”

His confession sits in the silent air of the church, and then it sinks down into the foundation where he doesn't have to look at it anymore. Knitting his fingers together, he lets out an irritated sound. Quietly, still staring at the ceiling, he admits, “I want to move forward. I just don’t know how.”

Confessions have always made him feel small. In this moment, he feels like a child looking for consolation from an indifferent parent. He figures that God is a busy person. He probably has better things to do with all that life and death shit, so Ronan’s not expecting an answer, which is why he’s startled when he hears someone say “Lynch.”

He jumps a little at his name, spine knocking against the hard wood of the pew. At first, he thinks _God?_ Then he sits up and sees Adam moving towards him. He wasn’t that far off with his guess; Adam isn’t God, but Ronan worships him like he is one, so really, what’s the difference? Although, he doesn’t think that Adam fits into this dark, contained religion; Adam is too wild for Catholicism. He belongs with something that gives him freedom—that lets him spread out like crawling ivy. 

Looking up at Adam, Ronan can clearly see that he’s just woken up. He’s rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and his hair is a scruffed up mess. As he moves closer, he wobbles a bit on his feet, knobby ankles exposed—he hadn’t bothered with socks or shoes either. Sitting down next to Ronan, he pulls his legs up to rest on the pew, setting his forearms on his knees. Feeling self-conscious, Ronan looks down and feigns interest in his hands, cleaning the invisible dirt out of his nails. 

“Ronan,” Adam says, eyes focusing on Ronan’s hands. His voice is still rough from sleep and it breaks a little when he asks, “Why’re you down here?”

Ronan doesn’t answer, just continues to pretend like he isn’t embarrassed. He’d rather had Adam caught him jerking off than catch him admitting weakness to a God that he doesn’t even believe in. 

When Ronan doesn’t answer, Adam turns to face the cross at the front, eyes pensive. After a second, he turns back to Ronan and sees that he’s started to rip into his cuticles. His face turns into something softer, and he reaches to touch lightly at Ronan’s shoulder. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

Ronan looks up and faces Adam, which turns out to be a big mistake. He doesn’t know how to hide emotion from him anymore. Adam, who had watched him cry over Gansey and his mother’s death. Adam, who had slept in the BMW with him in an act of solidarity. Adam, who had traced his tattoo and put his fingers to Ronan’s mouth. Anything less than the truth, the _absolute truth,_ felt wrong.

“I’m scared,” he admits. He almost regrets saying it the minute that it comes out. He had only ever uttered that sentence once to Matthew, and that was only because he had wanted to get out of a horror movie marathon when they were kids. He wants to take that sentence back, wants to wrap it up inside of his ribs where it can’t worry Adam. Instead, he shifts his gaze away, clenches his fists, and grits through the discomfort of being vulnerable.

“Oh,” Adam responds, surprised.  He’s not accustomed to Ronan being so forward with his feelings. His eyebrows furrow together, forming a wrinkle in the delicate skin between them. “But the demon is gone for good. There’s no way that it can come back,” he assures.

He sounds confident—like he’s put the whole ordeal behind him—but Ronan catches him glancing and wincing at the faded purple fingerprints on his neck. _Oh._ That would be a talk for another day.

“It’s not that,” Ronan starts. “I’m … everything is changing. My mom is gone. Gansey almost died. He and the maggot are leaving. You’re leaving …” he grunts out, feeling his body coil up with tension. “Everything is changing and nothing is for sure. I don’t know what to do when everything is changing. I don’t want to go back to how I was before.”

He expects Adam to look scared, to be appalled by his sudden outburst of unchecked emotion. Instead, Adam looks at him calmly and then untangles himself from his folded position. He shuffles closer to Ronan, nudging his foot with his own and pressing their sides together. He takes his hand and places it in his lap, running light circles over his palm. They sit like this in silence as Adam takes time to think and Ronan lets the tension melt out of his body.

After a minute, Adam answers, “I don’t think that you could go back to how you were before. I don’t think you know who that person even is anymore.”

Adam’s words hit Ronan in the stomach like a bomb. His initial reaction is to lash out; he’s never liked it when other people have assumed anything about him. But before he can voice his irritation, Adam continues, “I mean, you still know who that person is, obviously. It was you at some point.” He pauses for a moment, searching for the right words. “What I mean is that, although you may have similar impulses and desires, there’s another part of you in the present that prevents you from going back to being that person.”

Ronan, at a loss for words, simply says, “Oh.”

“Does that make sense?” Adam asks.

Yes, it does. 

Because Adam is right. Present-Ronan still shares a lot of fundamental traits with past-Ronan; they both have that constant buzz of energy under their skin, just waiting to be harnessed and shaped into creations. But present-Ronan is more solid; he has ambitions and responsibilities that he actually cares about. He can’t afford to throw caution to the wind like he used to. There would be hefty consequences to pay; Ronan knows this from experience. 

He’s surprised that he’s not upset. If Gansey had said those words, Ronan would have snapped at him. He surmised that Gansey would have added his special flavor of Gansey disdain to his explanation, reminding Ronan of all that he and Declan had sacrificed to keep him safe. However, when Adam spoke of his past, he talked about it like fact, like logic. Adam had never infantilized him. He had simply waited for him to get over his shit, only stepping in when Ronan was about to completely fuck up. Adam accepted the rougher parts of him; hell, he shared some of Ronan’s impulses, and Ronan adored him for it.

“Also,” Adam says, cutting through Ronan’s sappy thoughts, “Gansey and Blue are coming back. They’d miss your grumpy ass. And … I’m coming back too.”

Ronan’s brain perks up and short circuits at the last part of Adam’s statement. _Oh._ They had been dancing around this topic for a few days, caught in the tumultuous beginning of a new relationship. Hearing this reassurance out in the open soothes a sore on his heart.

“Yeah?” he asks, trying to hide the awkward, boyish smile that's curling its way onto his lips. “You’re coming back?”

“Yeah,” Adam laughs, looking up at Ronan and forming a smile of his own.

Their smiles make the moment feel enormous, the air around them filling with an immense sense of happiness and relief. They’ve not even discussed the details of Adam’s return yet, but that simple promise of coming back is enough to keep them both satisfied for now. 

Feeling a little overwhelmed, Adam looks away, pretending to be interested in the non-existent dirt under Ronan’s nails. “Come back to bed?” he asks.

Ronan snorts out a laugh to distract Adam from the blush that’s creeping up his neck. Something about that phrase makes him feel a little too tender and domestic. He feels like he needs to lighten the mood with an insult. “I thought that was my line, Parrish. You’re always the one staying up late to read your nerd books.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Adam replies, like he can see through Ronan’s joke. Grabbing Ronan’s wrist and dragging him up from the pew, he says, “Come on.”

Feeling simultaneously elated and exhausted, Ronan lets him lead them out of the church and up the stairs to the apartment, where they twine together under the blankets. Pulling him into his chest, Adam tucks Ronan’s head under his chin, fondly smoothing over his temples and the lines of his scalp. They fall asleep like that, in a snug, sated heat, anxiety quieted for the night. 


End file.
